When first confronted with an illness or injury, you must quickly decide whether the case is life threatening—whether there’s a risk of death or permanent disability if the patient does not receive immediate care (within 30 minutes or less).

The most difficult decisions involve cases in which you feel safe waiting 30 minutes or more to receive care, but still require treatment at a hospital, rather than at an urgent care clinic or doctor's office.

This section summarizes our hospital ratings and describes other information you can gather yourself. The section “Hospital Ratings Data Details,” listed below, provides further discussion of these data and its strengths and weaknesses.

The most important thing you can do to assure yourself high-quality medical care is to form a strong relationship with a good primary care physician and, at times, together make informed decisions on specialty care. We identify top area doctors.